Today In History

West Side Story 1961 The setting is the Upper West Side of New York City in the late 1950s. Like many other musicals of its time, Hollywood looked to a successful Broadway stage play for its source material. After her success in Spendor in the Grass, Natalie Wood was chosen for the lead female role, and Richard Beymer, known for his performance in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), took the lead male role. Anita, was played by Rita Moreno. The ground-breaking, dynamic film featured racial strife between rival New York street gangs (Puerto Ricans and white European immigrant families), juvenile delinquency and inner-city problems of the mid-twentieth century - in exhilarating musical and dance form. Some of the film was shot on location in Manhattan, but most of it was actually filmed on sound stages with stylized, artificial studio sets. Its achievement as a ten Oscar winner has only been surpassed by two films, each with eleven Oscars: Ben-Hur (1959) and Titanic (1997).